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Viruses: the good, bad and the ugly

To propose as RD does that religion is a kind of "bad virus" (memetically speaking, of course) requires that one grant that there could be "good viruses" as well. But such viruses are judged good or bad only in light of how they affect the well-being of the affected organism(s). So in speaking of bad viruses RD is to bring memetics into conflict with his genetics (that is, with SelfishGeneTheory). For according to the latter, everything that an organism does is to be evaluated as if it existed ultimately for the sake of enabling the gene to duplicate itself. When memes, as viruses, are judged as good or bad, however, they are evaluated not on the basis of how they affect the reproductive success of their possessors, but on on the basis of how they affect their possessors' experience well-being. To speak of good and bad viruses, therefore, is to depart from natural science and enter into the realm of ethics.

One may object to the above analysis by claiming that memetics has only an intermediate concern with individual fulfillment: it is ultimately concerned with how fulfillment, like other aspects of human practices, contributes to reproductive success. Such an objection, however, does not seem plausible, as I will now show: consider, how it is in princple possible that a meme may both lead to higher reproductive success and make folks less happy: in such a case, this meme would be both adaptive and undesirable. This ugly counter-example shows that adaptivity does not necessarily imply a tendency to make the possessor happy. The relation between the two, if there is any, is an empirical question.

One may object to my analysis by pointing out that we call ideas and their possessors "sick." To this I would reply that there is nothing wrong with using these analogies: just don't pretend that such talk is scientific. RD's virus analogy doesn't heed this warning about pretending to be what one is not: instead, it is pretentious. Put another way, RD commits a category error in conflating ethics (specifically eudaimonistics ethics) with natural science: a mistake he makes clear elsewhere that he wishes to avoid.
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